1

The woman’s boot scraper had gone missing, and the way she talked about it, you’d have thought it was encrusted with sapphires.  We might have found a guy up in a tree and a Mexican in a Buick, but our ordinary sort of crime kept chugging along.  We didn’t have enough manpower to let me out of taking calls. Ronnie was working his weekly speed trap out by the winery at Rockfish, and Doug was busy chalking tires and answering complaints in town, so the sheriff handled what he could, and I responded to the rest.  Kate rode along just to take the air and snarl.

It was Saturday, and we were four days in when the boot scraper went missing.  Late morning I pulled off the Wintergreen Road into one of our finer gated estates.  I had to talk us in through the intercom, show my badge to the security camera.  We were about another quarter hour driving to the house. 

“What’s it called again?” she asked me.

“Bel Ronde.”

“Beautiful . . . what?”

“Ronde,” I told her.

They’d placed some sort of sculpture on the grounds.  A big thing, steel and granite. Abstract.  Homely.

“Looks like testicles on a plate,” Kate said.

“Maybe you ought to stay in the car.”

The driveway appeared to be river stone, and the house was one of those federalist piles more common around here than you might imagine.  This one, however, had been improved with a sunroom and porches and awnings.  The slate roof looked new.  The corgis looked old.  The gardener looked Filipino.

We weren’t entirely out of the car when the lady of the house burst through the front door and pointed at the porch floor. 

“Right there,” she told us and quivered a little.

We climbed onto the porch and had a look.  She introduced herself as a Williams from the shore.  The way she said it I felt certain I was supposed to know which shore, maybe even which Williams. 

Her husband stepped outside, but she told him, “We don’t need you here.”

He pivoted like he’d heard that before and plunged back into the house.

She was gratified the F.B.I. had taken an interest in her boot scraper.  I think Kate just flashed her credentials so she could light up without grief.  Even a Williams from the shore wouldn’t tell a special agent she wasn’t allowed to smoke. 

There were bolt holes in the porch floor.  I did enough detective work to discover the bolts resting on the porch rail, by which I mean I looked over and saw them from where I was.

“I hate to say this,” the woman told me in a conspiratorial whisper, “but I think Manny sold it.”

“Who’s Manny?”

“Ssshhhh,” she said and pointed. 

Aside from being a master thief, Manny must have had super hearing because he was halfway across the yard prettying up a petunia pot.

“Why would he do that?”

“They sell things.  I don’t know.  They need money all the time.”

“Does Manny speak English?”

“When he wants to.”

Lucky for me, he wanted to.  He told me, “Hi,” straightaway.

“You know that thing on the porch?” I said and then was obliged to turn to Mrs. Williams who was lingering by the door.  “What does it look like?” I shouted to her.

She told me, “Bernadette.”

“Bernadette?”

Manny helpfully pointed at a corgi.  The oldest fattest one sprawled on the lawn.

“So that thing . . .” I started.

Manny nodded and told me, “For shoes.”

“Where is it?”

He pointed more or less at a camellia bush.

“Show me.”

Kate had wandered out to the pasture fence by them.  Bel Ronde had a half dozen warmbloods prettying up the grounds the way some people go in for cement deer.  One of them trotted over to her. 

I heard Kate say, “Hold it!” and watched her back well away at sort of a trot herself.

Manny led me to some sort of shed where the boot scraper in question was sitting on a section of the Post atop a potting bench.  It had been freshly and hideously painted.  The scraper part coming out of the dog’s back was black like it should have been, but the cast-iron corgi was done up in lifelike colors with eye rust and yellow teeth and a gaudy pink tongue.

“A surprise for the misses,” Manny told me.

“From you?”

He shook his head.  “The mister.”

“He knows it’s out here?”

Manny nodded.

I went directly to have a word with the mister, knocked on the back door.  He opened it with a chunk of bagel shoved into his mouth.  He was one of those sockless loafer guys.  Bermuda shorts.  Appreciable gut.  Some sort of banker, I imagined, because it helped sustain my bile.

“What am I doing here?” I asked him.

He put a finger to his lips, told me, “Ssshhhh,” and shot bagel crumbs my way.  Then he revealed to me in a whisper, “Birthday coming up.”

“You let her call the police?”

He laughed.  “Yeah.” I could tell what he was thinking.  The surprise would be that much grander now that actual cops were involved.

“It didn’t occur to you we might have better things to do?”

He launched directly into an accounting of county taxes he paid, donations he made to beneficent funds, people he knew all over. 

“Anyway,” he added and slapped my shoulder, “what the hell happens around here?”

When I rounded the house, I saw Kate by the Crown Vic with the radio mic in hand.  Mrs. Williams from the shore was still standing where I’d left her.

“Well?” she said in that haughty tidewater way that set me off.

“It’s back in the shed all painted up. Talk to your husband.  Happy birthday.”

“Twenty minutes,” I heard Kate say into the mic.  “Everything okay?” she asked me.

I shook my head and muttered.

“Madras guy’s family rolled in.”

Of course, Mrs. Williams from the shore had already called the sheriff by the time we got back to the station.  Verle would have preferred, I think, to have been serving in congress, but we had a gasbag of longstanding who wasn’t about to be dislodged, so Verle had entered an election he thought he could win instead.  Down deep, he cared more about public relations than actual law enforcement, had his eye on the governor’s mansion for all I knew.

The result was that people like Mrs. Williams from the shore would complain about their boot scrapers or something of the sort, and the sheriff would always dress us down instead of backing us up.  He met me and Kate on the sidewalk in front of the station house, removed his Stetson and held it before him like I guess he’d seen it done.

“Grieving family,” he told us and jerked his head to have us know they were inside.  “A couple of things though,” he added, and he paused the way he liked to when he believed he had a life lesson to impart.  This was where Ronnie usually lit a Merit. 

“Look,” the sheriff told us, “I got a call from Bel Ronde.”

“Beautiful what?” Kate asked him.

“What?”

“Bel Ronde.  Beautiful . . . ?"

“I don’t know,” the sheriff told Kate and then glanced at me as he said, “You might have asked Evelyn about that instead of telling her all about her . . . thing.”

“Evelyn?” I said.

“Look,” the sheriff told us again, “you can’t piss off these people.  I need them . .  . we need them . . . to be effective.”

“You been out there?” Kate asked him.

“A time or two.”

“What the hell’s that thing out front, in the field? Looks like nuts on a plate?”

That stopped him for a minute.  He spun his hat.

“Look,” he said.  “I know it wasn’t much, as crime goes.”

“Wasn’t even crime,” I told him.  “The goddamn thing was in the shed, painted up for her birthday.  The husband . . .”

“Dwight,” the sheriff said.

“He knew it all along.  Now we’ve got people in there, right,” I pointed at the station house door, “with a husband and father dead and murdered, and we’re out chasing down boot scrapers?”

By now the sheriff was spinning his hat so fast I was getting a little dizzy.

“Look.  Now I’m going to have to ride out and talk them down.”

The sheriff settled his hat on his head and pushed until his ears pooched out.

Barry Ward’s family was sitting all together on our rickety bench.  Deputy Doug was fetching water for the widow as me and Kate came in. 

“These are the Wards,” he told us. “From Watchung,” he added significantly just to clue us in that these were the Wards attached to our dead guy in the tree and not just run-of-the-mill ungrieving Wards who’d blundered in for a visit.

I’d long since learned not to lay on the sympathy the way the sheriff liked to.  People with dead friends and relations don’t care about condolences from cops.  They just want you to haul in the son-of-a-bitch who caused them to be where they are.  So I introduced myself and Kate, made short shrift of my manners, and then realized we couldn’t march them up to the conference room for a chat.  There were photos of corpses up there with hats nailed to their heads.

“Have you eaten?” Kate asked.

They hadn’t, so we took them out for lunch.  Somewhere hard by where we could walk to, which turned out to be The Cue Ball. 

Johnny was perched at the bar already with a bourbon and a bump.  He greeted us by telling Kate, “Oh shit.”

I didn’t get the feeling our little town was very much like Watchung due to the way the Wards, all three of them, kept gawking at everything.  The general decor in The Cue Ball was whatever Johnny felt like hanging up, so the place was a Dixie/Nascar/Dukes of Hazzard stew.  There was lots to see, all of it crap, and then patrons thrown into the mix.  Saturday lunch at The Cue Ball, and we were on the early side, featured chiefly the biscuits-and-gravy crowd not yet home from Friday night.  A couple of the boys were half dressed up like they’d been to Richmond, but most of them looked and smelled like they’d woken up in their trucks.

I steered the Ward family toward the hamburger.  Only the daughter resisted.  She’d become a vegetarian up in Happy Valley, so she made do with slaw and butter pickles and a pile of Cue Ball cheese fries.

They were sad, of course, and still shocked a little, but they mostly seemed weary of each other.  Mrs. Ward—her name was Arlene—kept trying to be bereaved, but her son and her daughter would gang up to remind her how little she’d cared for their father.  They were armed between them with the sort of damning evidence best not aired in front of strangers.  The son, his name was Barry too, reminded Arlene about her boyfriend who the daughter, who went by A.J., described in punishing detail.  She did a good five minutes on his hairpiece alone, just wouldn’t let it drop.

Arlene responded by looking queasy and telling her kids, “Come on.” 

The kids just talked right over her.  The daughter had learned enough in psych class to lay siege to her mother with verbiage. Her brother grunted mostly and smacked the table for emphasis.  He was seventeen and had driven them down.  Badly, from what we could tell, because there was heated discussion among them over who would drive them back.

I’d been worried about how exactly Kate and I might speak of their loved one.  But it turned out—beyond “Did he suffer?”—they weren’t hungry for details and didn’t indulge in the usual talk about somebody having to pay. 

For their part, the kids aired their grievances and raised belated objections to the way their mother had behaved and their parents had chosen to live.  Arlene didn’t bother to defend herself beyond saying occasionally, “Now . . .”  She did send her hamburger back to the kitchen twice to get it recooked, which I gathered was how she chose to show her starch.

A. J. was the one who wanted to see the place I’d found her father.  Her brother groaned like he had to get straight back to Watchung for a date while Arlene sniffed her pickle spear and then laid it back down on her plate.  

I decided to walk them in above Rita’s house.  It turned out they weren’t woodsy sorts, so we hadn’t gotten awfully far before the pack of them started grumbling.  I just stopped on a flat stretch of forest terrain and told them, “Found him here.”

“Here” looked pretty much like everywhere else.  We all stood around and soaked it in for a minute.

“What happened to him?” Barry Junior asked me.  “Nobody’ll tell us.”

I was sifting through a half dozen charitable lies when Kate piped in, “Killed by some fucker. Still waiting for results.”

Killed by some fucker worked for the Wards.  The general feeling seemed to be that they’d done their duty as a family, so we marched back out, and they followed us in their car to the station house where we convened on the sidewalk and took leave of each other.

“Mr. Ward’s station wagon,” I said to Arlene. “What do you want us to . . .?”

“Think somebody’ll take it for scrap?” 

The children, who’d objected to most everything that had come out of their mother’s mouth, couldn’t between them locate cause to champion that Roadmaster.  Instead they fought over who’d be driving back.

I promised to call them with developments, but what they wanted were directions, the shortest way to the interstate that would carry them out of here.

“Was it forty-three hundred?” Kate asked me as we stood on the sidewalk waving.

“Think so.”

“That ought to keep you in Tater Tots for a while.”

***

“Some sort of problem,” Doug told me as he handed me a Post-it.  “I’d go, but the sheriff told me to stay here.”

“What problem?”  Doug had just written “fruit stand” on the Post-it.  “There’s fruit stands all over.”

“Fight or something.  Place out past the turnpike with all the peaches.  Gruber’s, right?”

“Good spot to look for Mexicans,” I told Kate.  “Let’s take that key we found.”

The Gruber family had been growing fruit for years.  Apples and peaches and nectarines.  They’d lately branched out into strawberries and had turned their modest roadside stand into a full-fledged store with produce and cheese and side meat and sodas and a soft-serve yogurt machine.  As citizens, they were sons-of-bitches, most every last Gruber in the county.  They loved a dollar far too much to be decent and humane.

Their orchard hands were all illegals and lived in squalid shacks that the Grubers, being Grubers, overcharged them for the use of.  They sold them groceries at a markup and carted them from orchard to orchard in vans for which they levied a transportation fee. 

The Grubers irrigated out of local creeks in defiance of federal law.  They sprayed any damn insecticide they pleased on everything they grew.  Instead of respirators, their tractor drivers wore bandanas, just like bandits.  The workers had a soccer field for a while at the orchard out by Batesville, but the wasted acreage gnawed at the Grubers who finally planted it over with winesaps.

They were a clan of self-serving troglodytes, as far as I was concerned, and it would have done my heart some good to have rolled up on a few Grubers getting abused. Instead we found two dumpy women quarreling over a parking space.  Not the handicapped space in front of the fruit stand door but the one in the shade hard beside it.  A Buick Regal and an old Ford Galaxy were each half nosed into the thing.

A man was behind the wheel of the Buick and a man behind the wheel of the Ford.  They were waiting to see what their wives would tell them to do.  The one in the Ford was listening to qualifying, probably from Martinsville, while the guy in the Buick—who was blinky and twitchy in a disarming sort of way—just kept saying, “Aw sugar,” to a woman twice his size who’d swing around every now and again so she could tell him, “Enough!”

Naturally, there was no talking sense to either of those ladies.  I wandered over and made an attempt, but they just prattled at me.  Apparently, they’d both pulled in first, and they both had complaints that made regular walking too much of a bother.  Neither one could see why the other couldn’t park across the lot.

Two Grubers were in attendance.  The grumpy patriarch and his granddaughter.  He was in his seventies and she was maybe sixteen.  There was hope for her yet.  I knew her a little from speaking at the high school.  The sheriff would send us around to talk up the dangers of drug addiction.  We had a meth and a hillbilly heroin problem back in the hollows, but the local school kids were mostly Bible thumpers by upbringing.  They cared about deer season, tricked out trucks, and Jesus in that order.  The boys anyway.  The girls I couldn’t begin to figure out.  They seemed to care about the boys a little and about their hair a lot.   

That Gruber girl approached me one day when I was leaving the school for my car.  She wanted me to help a friend of hers who was having a problemo, she called it.  The friend turned out to be a fruit picker.  The substance was fortified wine.  There wasn’t much I could do beyond figuring I’d be drowning in Night Train too if I was stuck a thousand miles from home doing orchard work for Grubers.  But it seemed a good sign to me that this girl—her name was Connie—could be both a Gruber and somehow think of a fruit picker as a friend.

Her granddaddy was another matter.  He didn’t like anybody much, and he was old enough not to have to pretend he did.

The first thing he said to me out in the lot was, “Get this shit sorted why don’t you.”

“Who’s that?” Kate asked me.

“The uber Gruber,” I told her.  “Roscoe.”

“Is that yogurt?”  She was eyeing the soft-serve machine.  The store was five garage doors across the front, all of them raised and open, so the customers could watch and shop if that’s what they wanted to do.

Kate wandered into the store while I directed those ladies into their sedans.  To rest themselves, I told them, and I had their husbands roll back a little, enough to let me wave in a coupe that had just turned in off the street.  The woman with the blinky husband had him take her elsewhere pronto. The other one got dropped off at the door.  I followed her inside where she leaned on a buggy and complained about the price of everything. 

Kate was at the register paying Connie for a tub of peach yogurt when I arrived to show her the snapshot I’d taken of our dead Mexican. 

Connie told us, “Aw.”  She knew him right away.

“Juan something. What happened to him?”

“Do you know where he lived?” I asked her.

Connie nodded and then exhaled in a vaguely shameful sort of way. 

The Grubers had two orchards in our county and three over in Albemarle.  Our dead Mexican had lived in Gruber housing across the line near North Garden.  I’d seen the place, so I had a fair idea of what we’d find when we got there.  It was troubling enough, as housing went, that I felt like I ought to warn Kate.

“They converted a bunch of chicken coops.”

“For what?” she wanted to know, and if you weren’t acquainted with Grubers it was a perfectly sensible question. 

There were no trees around to offer any shade or even scraggly shrubbery to pretty up the spot.  Just four cinder block chicken houses in a field along the road.  They’d been sectioned into rooms, cells really with a door on the front and a small awning window on the back. Ten rooms to a coop, so forty altogether.  A big open-air shed sat opposite where the Grubers kept tractors and sprayers and beat up orchard trucks.  Once we’d piled out of the car, the pungent stink of pesticide was nearly overwhelming.

I doubted another Gruber had been near the place in years.  They had foremen running everything, like trustees in a prison, men who’d survived the labor and toxins and had found enough favor with Grubers to serve as go-betweens and run the harvests every season.  Grubers did the paperwork.  Grubers kept the money.

There were dogs around, short-haired mutts attracted by the garbage heaped in a trench hard beside the shed.  It looked an equal blend of household trash and empty Cygon barrels.

“How did you know Juan?” Kate asked Connie, who’d ridden out to the orchard with us.

“He used to bring fruit to the stand.  Had this smile, you know?”

“Ever see him here?”

“Once,” Connie told Kate.  “I brought him his hat when he left it.”

Connie led us to the third coop over.  The building was maybe six feet tall and eight or ten feet deep.  The cinder block had been painted white, coat upon coat, probably in a bid to put the chicken smell to route.  It seemed to have worked well enough.  We weren’t blinded anyway by the funk of poultry ammonia and manure.

I had Juan’s key out before me and Kate discovered we didn’t need it.  Somebody had taken bolt cutters to the cheap Chinese lock hanging from the hasp, and we swung the door wide to find the place had been emptied of Juan’s effects.  There was a stripped bed, a chair, and a cardboard dresser.  Nothing personal at all.

“Who cleaned it out?” I asked Connie.  I had to bend to keep from banging my head on the rafters.

“Foreman probably. People go away all the time and don’t come back.”

I had a pretty fair idea where Juan’s stuff had ended up. We fired three or four rounds into the air and still couldn’t drive off the dogs.  Then we flipped to see who’d climb into the trench. 

I couldn’t find much of anywhere to step that wasn’t making lumpy gravy, a stew of seeping pesticide, rotten produce muck, and bones.  There was some sort of spaniel in the garbage pit with me.  He kept growling like the trash was all his.

“I’ll shoot him if he rips your throat out,” Kate told me.

“A click or two before would be all right.”

I didn’t know what I was looking for beyond Juan-related stuff.  Mostly I came across chicken bones and watermelon rind in every possible state of decay from still-fresh-yesterday to iridescent liquid.  There were flyers from the IGA and unopened Internal Revenue envelopes.  Nothing for a Juan that I could find until I spied the box.  The damned spaniel was standing on top of it.  That’s how he was staying afloat.  He’d found a massive pork bone and had perched on the box to gnaw it.

I could see photographs and trinkets, trifling stuff like people held to when they didn’t have anything else beyond a bed and a dresser and a chair.

“He’s standing on it,” I told Kate.

She pulled out her Glock and had half leveled it on that spaniel when Connie made a pitiful sixteen-year-old’s noise.

“Just poke him,” I told her. “There’s bound to be something in the shed.”

Kate came back with what appeared to be the world’s longest tomato stake and jabbed it at that spaniel who went into a frenzy.  He bit the stick.  He snapped at me.  He went back to his bone.

Connie got on her knees and called him.  “Honey,” she said and slapped the ground.  He growled, took up his bone, and tried to retreat a little.  He only succeeded at falling off his box into the seepage.  I reached over and snatched the box free, swung it up out of the trench. 

Juan’s box held photographs mostly, a couple of books in Spanish, a plastic dish where I figured Juan tossed his pocket change at night.  A couple of number two pencils.  Butterscotch candy.  A beat-up army surplus flashlight, and a key to some variety of Buick.

“Did Juan have a car?” I asked Connie.

She shrugged.  “Grandpa would probably know.”

The people in the photos must have been family.  Juan’s parents.  His little sister.  There were a couple of high desert landscape snapshots, barren south-of-the-border terrain.  I had to guess his clothes had gone to everybody else.

Connie told us her grandfather was probably home by now having his usual late Saturday dinner, so we detoured by his house, a brick showplace in among a cluster of peach trees heavy with fruit.

A couple of Roscoe’s orchard workers were spending their Saturday cutting his grass.  We interrupted them to show them our photo of Juan but only got shrugs and no ses.

Roscoe’s current wife, a brassy creature out of Tennessee, wouldn’t unlatch the front doorscreen to let us into the house.  No amount of pleading on Connie’s part could move her even a little.

“Baby girl,” she said to Connie, “you button up.”

“Mr. Gruber,” I shouted into the house.

“Eating,” was all I got back.

Roscoe had come to think himself some kind of potentate, like the crown prince of the county or an emperor of the mountain kingdom.  That’s what happens when everybody who depends on you for wages can get hauled off and deported on your whim.

Kate pulled out her credentials and pressed her badge against the screen. 

“Roscoe?” the current Mrs. Gruber said.

“Eating,” he told her, just like he’d told me. 

The current Mrs. Gruber lifted the screen hook.  “I’ll say you busted in.”

Roscoe had graduated to his toothpick by the time we reached the kitchen.  He’d shoved his plate aside and was sprawled back in his seat with one hand resting on his belly.  He glanced at me and Kate with typical Gruber disdain.

“Sugar,” he said to Connie, “go get your grandpa a freestone.”

Connie turned and left the house without a peep.

“This better be goddamn good,” Roscoe told us.  Then he gave Kate a full once over.  “Don’t know you.”

“FBI,” I said.

“Let’s see it,” he told Kate, and she got out her badge again.

“What’s going on then?”

“We found one of your boys dead,” I told him.

“Dead how?”

“Murdered,” Kate said.

“Him,” I added and showed Roscoe the photo of Juan, which he even studied a little.

He shrugged at length.  “Can’t know them all.”

Connie came back in with a plump, fresh peach just plucked off a tree in the yard.  Roscoe didn’t rinse it or even wipe it off.  He simply bit into it and let the juice run down his chin. 

“Know him?” Roscoe asked Connie as he pointed at the photo in my hand.

She nodded meekly.

“One of ours then?”

Connie nodded again.

“Call Keith,” he barked.

And the current Mrs. Gruber said, “All right,” from the front room. 

“Tell him to bring the box.”

Roscoe’s lone son, Keith, rolled up not ten minutes later.  He marched straight back to the kitchen and asked us, “What the hell’s all this?”

“Dead picker,” I told him.

“Dead from what?” he wanted to know.  Keith was carrying a metal strongbox by the handle on the top.  It was green and dented and all scratched up.

“Smothered, looks like,” Kate said. 

Keith looked her over.

“Fed,” Roscoe told him.

“One of ours do it?” Keith asked just me.

“Doubt it,” Kate said.  When Keith still wouldn’t look her way, she poked him. “I’m right here.”

“Where’s the box?” Keith asked his father.

Roscoe pointed at Keith’s hand. 

Keith said, “Oh.” 

Keith set the strongbox on the dinette table and asked the current Mrs. Roscoe Gruber for a soda.

“You don’t drink soda, Keith,” she told him, and she brought him coffee instead.

It was all kind of odd and awkward like Keith wasn’t quite all there but nobody wanted to drop the veil and explain any of it to us. 

Keith plopped down beside his father.  We weren’t invited to sit.  Keith looked just like Roscoe, only thirty years before.

“What do you want?” Keith asked us, asked me anyway.

I showed him the photo of dead Juan.  “Whatever you know about him.”

Keith glanced at the picture.  He shook his head.

“Get ‘em,” Roscoe said to the current Mrs. Gruber.

She retired to the front room, crossed to the door, and we heard her shout, “Ola!” at the fellows in the yard.  She added a couple of Tennessee tinged Andoles behind it.  That got followed by a vigorous foot-wiping session as those yardmen entered the house.

They were wiry little guys with bad mustaches.  They’d removed their caps and were holding them in their hands.  Not like the sheriff held his Stetson, but in a cringing sort of way.

Roscoe had me show them the photo of dead Juan. 

“Quien, amigos?” he asked them.

They both whispered, “Juan,” like they would have told a priest.

“Donde?”

They looked at each other and shrugged.  One of them unloaded a chattering, complicated burst of Spanish.

“We know where he is,” Kate told Roscoe. 

He looked at her like she’d squatted and peed on his floor. 

“What do you want?” Roscoe asked me.

“Who they might have seen him with in the last few days.  Particularly back on . . .” I had to pause and think.  “Monday, Tuesday?” I asked Kate who nodded.

Roscoe told his yardmen, “Lunes, Martes.  Donde Juan?”

Those fellows looked at each other, and then they both said, “Trabaja.”  They rightly said it like working was just about all that Grubers allowed.

“You guys speak any English?” Kate asked them. 

The younger one raised his hand.

“Juan’s dead,” she told him.

He nodded.  He said, “Okay.”

“Somebody killed him,” she said and then reached with both hands and grabbed my neck in a dumbshow of snuffing me out.  “Comprende?”

Both of those fellows nodded.

“Problemente Martes.”

They nodded again in an eager, bobble-headed sort of way. 

“Did you see Juan on Lunes or Martes?”

They looked at each other.  We got “maybe” shrugs and “maybe” nods.

“With anybody?” Kate asked them.  “A gringo?”

They consulted again with glances and settled between them on “Uh uh.”

“Nobody?”

The older one spoke up this time.  “El coche roto.”

“Said his car was busted,” Roscoe told us.

“Juan had a Buick, right?” I asked those fellows, and together they nodded and looked toward Keith’s metal box. 

“Open it,” Kate told Keith who didn’t do anything.  Not in a contrary sort of way.  He just looked like he’d stopped listening, had tuned out not just Kate but all of the rest of us too.

So Roscoe opened it.  The box had a built-in combination latch, and Roscoe shielded the numbered wheels from us like we couldn’t just throw it on the floor and stomp it open if we liked.  He finally lifted the lid to reveal a tidy nest of documents, bundles of car titles and receipts and I.O.U.s.

Roscoe sifted through the titles, plucked one free and laid it on the dinette table.  “Looks like his,” he told us. 

I picked it up.  An ’87 Skylark.  Roscoe was listed as the owner.  A glance was all it took to prompt him to tell us, “He was paying it off.”

“Charge a little interest, do you?” Kate asked him.

“Carrying costs,” he told her and shrugged.

“Seen Juan’s car?” I asked Roscoe.

He shook his head.  “He’s paid up until the first of the month.  Got no cause to look.”

“Seen it?” I asked the yard men.

The man who spoke just Spanish tugged the sleeve of the other one and told him a thing he passed along to us.  “Juan took his car to a place.”

“What place?”

“You know,” he said.

“A shop?” Kate suggested.

That fellow nodded.  “A chop,” he told us both.

“Which one?”

They consulted again and then turned to us and shook their heads.

“Do you know?” Kate asked Keith and Roscoe together.

Keith plunged his finger in his coffee.  Roscoe said, “Dealer maybe.  Boy out in Stuart’s Draft next to the tractor place.”

Just then Roscoe’s Tennessee bride stepped into the kitchen to tell us, “Sheriff’s on the phone.  Wants to talk to ya’ll.”

Verle was waiting for us out in front of the station house.  He had his hat in his hands and by turns would spin the thing and worry the damage.  We saw him pacing from a quarter mile away.

I pulled to the curb, and me and Kate were hardly out of the car when Verle closed hard and told the both of us, “Look.”

2

Verle made it clear he only wanted us plaguing back hollow crackers.  If we had to bother decent people just to find a killer, then that was the sort of thing he’d rather see us leave undone.  I knew he’d come around in time.  Verle was always slow to the party.  So I put together a list of local ne’r-do-wells and nuts that Kate and I could eliminate while Verle was waking up.  

The following morning, we started with Leslie because he was on the way to that Stuart’s Draft car lot, and he was a good judge of local psychos as far was it went.  Leslie was an import from greater Birmingham who’d moved east, he’d told me once, in the modest hope of merely fitting in.  I don’t know what Leslie thought we were doing they weren’t up to in Alabama. 

Leslie wore iridescent eye shadow and bits of ladies’ lingerie, the occasional house dress and off-the-shoulder gown.  He preferred pumps to brogans, favored jangly silver bracelets.  He splashed himself each morning with enough White Shoulders to drown a frog.  None of that could change the fact that he was a homely, dumpy guy with a sizable gut and a deplorable comb-over.  He had a thoroughly creepy manner—was prone to groping and breathy asides—which earned Leslie the occasional beat down. 

Call a hillbilly cracker “sugar” or “honey” while resting a hand upon him and he’s little short of obliged to break your jaw.

Leslie had done twenty years at Kilby Prison outside of Montgomery.  He’d murdered his cousin one Christmas morning.  They’d quarreled over a camisole, and Leslie had tapped her, he liked to call it, with a Dutch oven. 

Leslie had probably gone into Kilby strange and come out of Kilby stranger, which was partly due to the penal system and partly to the sort of parents who’d make a boy grow up a Leslie in a place like Birmingham.  He lived in a ramshackle apartment building on a bluff high above the town of Afton, and the whole place was wrapped in Visqueen to help hold out the wind.  When a layer of plastic tore, a new layer got stapled on top, so that building was like a candy bar you could never hope to open.  The whole structure breathed and rustled whenever somebody cracked a door.

Leslie’s place was upstairs at the far end of a rickety veranda.  The apartments were glorified motel rooms with dining nooks and kitchenettes, and while the tenants might have been down at heel, they weren’t trash as a rule.  I’d served many a delinquent payment warrant up at Leslie’s building, but it wasn’t the sort of place where we got called to for fights and such.  The neighbors even left Leslie alone, a sort of testament to them.

He must have heard us coming.  That veranda popped and rattled as we traveled the length of it, did about everything really but collapse, so Leslie was waiting in the open doorway by the time we’d finally arrived. 

“My stars and garters,” he told me mostly in the sort of lisping, girlish voice that made the likes of Truman Capote sound butch.  Then Leslie caught sight of Kate and eyed her up and down. “What do we have here?”

“Special Agent LeComte,” I told him.

Leslie offered his fingers. “Enchante.”

The June weather had prompted Leslie to break out his paisley culottes, which he’d complemented with a sleeveless, pleated powder blue blouse.  I could see his scarlet bra straps.  He had on earrings and a broach.  His mules were rhinestone studded and open-toed. Leslie was having one of his clown makeup days.  Too much eye shadow, heavy rouge and lip gloss.  He looked like he’d come to the door straight off of a dinner theater stage.

“For fuck’s sake” was about all Kate could manage by way of a “How’s it hanging?”

I told Leslie he was a vision and got his clammy hand on my arm. He invited us in with just enough flourish to fumigate us with perfume.

You would have figured somebody’s maiden aunt lived in Leslie’s apartment.  Dried flowers and doilies all over the place.  A tufted chintz settee.  An empire tea cart freighted with china.  Watercolors on the walls no self-respecting dentist would hang. 

“We’ve got kind of a problem,” I told Leslie.  “Thought maybe you could help.”

Leslie flattened one hand against his sternum and reached for me with the other.  I dodged him by plucking a glass house cat off a handy side table and studied it like I’d never been so charmed by a nic nac before.

“I’m here for you, Ray.” 

Kate was wandering still, taking in the clutter.  I heard her snort and say to no one, “Christ.”

“You might have heard about the murders,” I said to Leslie.

Leslie informed me he’d been desolet for the past ten days or so and had stayed away from the TV and the paper.  I didn’t press him on the cause, just assumed life was tough for a guy on Afton Mountain wearing culottes and a blouse. 

“Two bodies,” I told him.  “Killed by some nut.”

“I hear you’re sort of a nut,” Kate chimed in. She was standing across the way examining some manner of crocheted cozy.  “What have you been up to?”

“You’re judgmental,” Leslie informed her.

Kate told him back, “No shit.”

“I put a file together.  Local guys.  Thought maybe you’d have a look.”

“Sure, Ray.” Leslie reached for me again, and this time I couldn’t slip him. “Buy me lunch,” he pleaded.  “Get me off this rock.”

Leslie didn’t own a car and didn’t have any genuine friends beyond the sort of guys who’d done with Leslie things that they’d regretted, which they usually worked their way beyond by beating Leslie up.  This was the first time I’d seen him in a great while when he hadn’t looked punched and throttled.  The lone virtue, I had to figure, of being desolet.

So some of us were ill and peevish in the Crown Vic there at first, and all of us were more perfumed than humans have any call to be.  But Kate unhappy and Kate just normal were almost the same thing, and she softened a little toward Leslie as we closed on Stuart’s Draft. 

“Where do you buy shit like that?” she eventually asked him, chiefly of his culottes.

“The women around here are built like Guernseys.  I can shop most anywhere.”

I’d met Leslie when I’d intervened in a beating he was taking at a place called Shorty’s just off the Wintergreen Road.  They sold bad sandwiches, nasty fried chicken, and no end of twelve-pack beer.  Leslie had offended some fellow there by being who he was.  He was wearing a blouse and trousers but with baby doll shoes and mascara, and that boy had taken one look at Leslie and gotten all confused. 

“What the hell’s this?” that fellow had asked Leslie as he tapped on Leslie’s blouse with considerable force and no little consternation.

“Ann Taylor,” Leslie told him.  He probably wet his lips and winked.

That boy then did what boys like him do.  He took a swing at Leslie, caught him high on the cheekbone and laid him open there. Leslie sluiced blood like a hydrant, which was why the call came in.  Leslie couldn’t usually be bothered to even put up his hands for defense.  He’d just stand there like one of those punching bags with lead shot in the bottom.  He’d rock and stagger, but he’d never go down.

I rolled up on a pulpy mess.  That boy had wailed away on Leslie.  He had a buddy who’d egged him on, kept him punching no matter what. 

“Hey here,” Leslie told me, just like he’d say it any old where.  He was bleeding all down his blouse front and dripping on the linoleum.

“You know this faggot?” the friend of the boy who’d been beating Leslie asked me.

Talking seemed a waste, so I gave him my elbow and left him spilling teeth on the floor.  The other one got two-handed attention.  He wasn’t sure he should fight back.  I was still in uniform then, and he was far too late deciding.  It turned out he couldn’t really take a punch.

“You all right?” I asked Leslie.

He just smiled and nodded, dribbled down his chin.

I took him to get sutured and then carried him home.  He’s been my breathy, smelly buddy ever since then. 

Leslie reached over the seat back, laid a paw on Kate’s shoulder, and suggested a hairstyle that he felt would better frame her face.

“Shut it, Liza,” she advised him.

That Stuart’s Draft car lot had plastic pennants strung about every damn where, and they were little short of deafening even in a light June breeze.  The office was a repurposed tool shed.  The cars were all fourth-hand heaps with their features—Factory Air! Power Windows! Five Speed!—painted in DayGlo orange on the windshields. 

The lot was deserted except for us. “Let me check over here,” I said and struck out for the tractor shop next door.  They sold bush hogs and harrows and pint-sized Kubotas, but mostly those boys all sat around and eyed the blonds on Fox.

“Who’s from next door?” I asked them.  Five of them were sitting there doing nothing.

“Hunting a car?” I should have known him from his gut and loafers before he said a thing. 

I nodded.  He shoved his hand my way.  “Friends call me Wally.” He was wearing enough Old Spice or Brute or Canoe—I couldn’t settle on which—to make me wonder if him and Leslie, once their scents got together, would be sufficiently potent to knock birds out of the sky.

When I got him outside, I told Wally, “Friends call me detective.”

I watched as he made an inventory of his leading offenses in his head.

“Do much business with the Grubers?”

“Some.”

“We’re looking for a Skylark.”

“Good choice.”

“Homicide investigation.”

Wally managed, “Oh.”

“A blue one.  ’89.”

“What the hell’s that?” Wally asked me. He pointed at Leslie who was smoothing his culottes and checking his face in the side mirror of an Econoline van.

“Associate,” I told him and then directed Wally’s notice to Kate who was sizing up an Opal by flexing the fender well with her foot.  “FBI,” I said, and Wally inventoried again.

“Don’t know what they told you.  I go up to the auto auction.  They say what they need, and I try to get it for him.”

Wally unlocked his tool shed/office.  He hadn’t improved it much.  Just particleboard and filing cabinets, a desk made out of a door, and a picture on the wall of a Bugatti motorcycle.

Leslie came in with Kate right behind him.  My eyes watered from the blended stink.

I handed the Skylark title to Wally who found the paperwork straightaway.

“Seen it since?” Kate asked him.

Wally shook his head.  “Don’t know why I would.”

“Keith sold it to this boy.” I showed Wally the photo I’d snapped of Juan.

“He don’t look good.”

“Isn’t.  Ever seen him?”

“Can’t say.  I mean . . . Mexicans.” 

“His car broke down,” Kate said. “What kind of shape was it in?”

“I’ve got a man that looks them over.  Gets them ready to sell and shit. He might could tell you. Not a mile down the road.”  Wally pointed nowhere much.

“Ever think what drapes could do in here?”  Leslie laid a doughy, clammy hand on Wally’s forearm.

Wally eyed Leslie’s hairy fingers as he told him, “No.”

That mechanic made stuff out of mufflers, manifolds and tail pipes too.  He had a whole family of people he’d largely welded together from exhaust scraps.  They were waving at us from the shoulder of the road.  I could only sort of pull into his lot.  There were cars all over the place in various states of dilapidation and heaps of rusting scrap everywhere a whole car wouldn’t fit.

The garage was raw cinder block with a solitary bay.  A filthy boy was parked outside it, perched on a pile of rotting tires.  He was busy throwing lug nuts at a groundhog.

I told him, “Hey.”

He glanced around, took in Leslie mostly.  He threw another lug nut, said back, “He’s in there.”

He went by J.W., and he only had one arm.  About an arm and a quarter, in truth, and he had a mallet in his good hand and a wrench under his flapper.  He was working on the back brakes of a junky Dodge pickup, trying to put something on that wouldn’t go or take a balky thing off.  It was hard to tell what with all the banging and the swearing.

He saw us only eventually.  It was dark in that bay everywhere his droplight didn’t reach. 

“Need some help?” I asked him.

He said, “Got him, don’t I?” With that he spat in the direction of the lug nut boy on the tires.

He looked us all up and down, even turned his light a little.  He didn’t pay any more notice to Leslie than he paid to Kate and me.

“You ain’t here about work.”

“Nope.”  I showed him my badge and Kate showed him hers.  Leslie pirouetted to size up the place (I guess) for draperies.

“Wally sent us.  We’re looking for a Skylark.  Blue.  ’89.”

“Orchard man?”

I nodded.

J.W. let his wrench drop from the crotch of his flapper and flung his mallet to the floor.  He led us over to what passed for his office.  A desk covered up in boxed spark plugs and invoices in piles.

“Can I have this?” Leslie was holding some kind of gear in his hand.  It was steel and toothy, looked modern-artish even to me.

J.W. spat on the filthy cement floor and told him, “Naw.”

He finally found the invoice and shoved it my way.  It was covered with the sort of chicken scratch that passed with J.W. for penmanship.  I couldn’t make out anything, not even Buick or Skylark.

“What the hell’s this say?”

He snatched the sheet from me like I’d dog cussed his mother.  He looked the thing over.  “Compression,” he told me.  “Cracked block.  Struts.  Tie rods.  Tranny making a fuss.”

“So you fixed it?” Kate asked him.

He shook his head.  “Changed the plugs and sent her on.  Wally don’t pay for much.”

“This guy bought it.”  I showed J.W. my snapshot.  His good arm didn’t seem long enough to let him focus in.  “Didn’t bring it back, did he?”

J. W. shook his head. “I don’t see them but the once.”

Leslie was handling J.W.’s air wrench, which J.W. didn’t think much of. “Hey, buddy,” he said, sounding half convinced that “buddy” was what he wanted.  He spat by way of directing Leslie where to put his air wrench down.

“What do you think went first?” Kate asked him.

J. W. couldn’t seem to pick among poor choices.  “Wasn’t much of a car, even for a Buick.”  He thought some more.  “Tranny maybe.  Clanking and rattling and shit.”

“Boy lived over by Batesville,” I told him.  “Who would he take it to over there.”

He looked at me and Kate, even glanced Leslie’s way.  He didn’t appear to be searching his memory but seemed instead to be deciding if he actually ought to tell us what he was about to say. 

“Hell,” he finally came out with by way of prelude and preamble.  “Place out there by Goodloe.  A Meecham runs it.  Ain’t no count, but they suck up all the work around those parts.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Turn right shy of Greenfield.  Back over in those hollows and shit.”

“Used to be a barn?”

“That’s it,” he told me.

“Know it?” Kate asked me. 

I nodded.  I’d been there once by accident.

It was a year or two before. I was trying to find a house.  We’d gotten a call about a woman swatting her husband with a shovel.  A meter reader had tipped us off, but he had the road number wrong, so I showed up a couple of hollows over by mistake.  I was still driving a cruiser at the time, and I pulled in at that barn/garage not meaning to do a thing but find out where I ought to be.  I wasn’t even out of the car entirely when all those grease monkeys ran, scattered the way bugs do when you pick up a rock.

Ordinarily I would have chased them, but I feared a fellow was getting brained.  I did take the time to see if anybody had been left behind.  That barn was full of pieces of cars all separated by type—fenders and bumpers and doors and windshields.  There was a pile of catalytic converters very nearly head high.  I made mental note to come back but somehow never did. 

By the time I found the gentleman with the irate wife and the shovel, he was back to weeding his garden and bleeding a little under his hat.  I made him show me the damage.  He looked like a piece of bruised fruit.  He had GoJo or Vaseline or something up where the skin had parted.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Tracked up the kitchen.  Guess I had it coming.”

He gave me a bag of zucchini to take, a vegetable I’ve no use for.  I rode it around in the car for a week and then tossed it in the trash.

***

Leslie insisted on luncheon, he called it.  He had a place in mind east of Afton that he gave out as a cafe.  It was more in the way of a car shed with a Fryolator.  Leslie had us claim the table he liked out under a hickory tree while he took a twenty from me and went off to the order window.

“Stuck with him all day?” Kate asked me.

“I’ll put him on the psychos,” I told her.  “He can go through the stack and tell us who’s up to what.”

“He’s still going to stink.”

I couldn’t really argue with her there.

Of course the food he brought to us—he’d carried it over on the tray—all tasted a little White Shouldery like grandma had whipped it up.  I ate mine anyway, given the pull of chili and curly fries, but Kate just poked and picked at hers and smoked.

“What is it with you?” she finally asked Leslie, after keeping herself from asking it for a couple of hours by then.

Leslie was working on a Double Doug, what they called their plate-sized burger, and there were condiment packets all over the table left over from him dressing it up.

“I like relish.  Don’t care who knows it.”

It was a lesson in the way that people think about themselves.

“You’re a guy, right?”  Kate was just laying groundwork.

Leslie gave the question some thought and nodded.  He seemed to guess he was a guy.

“So what’s all this?”  She meant the face paint, the sleeveless pleated blouse, the culottes, and the mules.  Given the fog of it we were basting in, she must have meant the White Shoulders too.

“What’s what?” Leslie asked her, and he wasn’t being fey.  I’d been around Leslie enough to know when he was playing breathy stupid.  He just flat out didn’t seem to know what she meant.

So Kate looked at me and snorted like maybe I’d explain it to him, but I was already having a sort of revelation about it all.  There Leslie sat looking like a rodeo clown on ladies’ night and smelling like my great Aunt Irma’s closet, which all felt normal enough to him that he didn’t think a thing about it.  Leslie just figured he was maybe at the higher end of relish use.

I’d been wondering since the trebuchet what a guy might look like who’d mount a career out of chasing around the country making people dead.  And not just battered and beaten and killed.  I’d seen enough of that ilk already.  But patiently, deviously dead, like he was gifted in that sort of thing.  Somewhere in my head, I’d thought I’d know him when I saw him.  I imagined him at the station house sitting in our holding cell.  I’d gaze in at him through the bars, and he’d strike me as distinctive.  A homicidal mastermind viewed in captivity.  I’d decided it would be like looking in on a panda or an elk.  He’d appear clear to me then, and he’d look like what he was.

But then I listened to Leslie, and not the way I usually listened to Leslie with my brain half closed off from his stink and the rest of me dodging his touch.  I watched him actively wonder what in the world Kate might be talking about when she pressed him to tell her what was up with him.  Nothing was up with him, as far as Leslie seemed to think.  He was doing precisely what the Lord intended, except maybe for the overabundance of relish on his burger. 

For his part, Leslie eyed Kate up and down.  “What’s all that?” he asked her with some breathy shirtiness.

While I’d figured all along our trebuchet guy would look like anybody, now I had to imagine he’d think like anybody too.  He’d think he was like the rest of us, just with a hobby and a quirk.

“So what’s all this?” I’d ask him, meaning homicidal mayhem as a lifestyle choice and a sort of going career, and he’d respond with his version of “I like relish” and tack on a “So what?”

“Don’t you, Ray?” was what I heard.

I’d lost the thread of what they were saying.  I glanced at Leslie.

“Don’t you?” he asked me.

I nodded.  I told him, “Yeah.”

“You think he’s pretty?” Kate flicked her Iroquois to the ground in disgust.

“Well, I mean . . . not pretty pretty.”

Leslie went all land-a-goshen.

“But handsome for a . . .”  I gestured toward Leslie in a way that let me off from saying exactly what he was.

It hardly pleased him and kept Kate disgusted.  She got up from the table, dumped her lunch in the barrel by the tree trunk.  “Come on,” she told us and headed back to the car.

We watched her go, me and Leslie.

“She needs estrogen or something.”

“Yeah,” I allowed.  “Something,” I told him.

“You going to eat those?” Leslie asked me of my last three curly fries.

I only sort of knew where that garage might be, which antagonized Kate further still.  She liked to go, she told me, straight to places and get done what she was up to.  Not blunder around the countryside with Maude (she called him) in the back.

“Honey,” Leslie told her, and I got the feeling he was going to recommend a deep massage or a course of vitamin E.

“Don’t you honey me,” Kate told him back.

“That’s enough,” I said.  “And here we are.”

Just dumb luck on my part.  I was down to my last shabbily paved and pitted back hollow roadway when I recognized the barn/garage we’d been looking for up ahead.  I eased back far enough to put us out of sight.

“Don’t want them running.”

“I’ll go,” Kate told me.  “They’ll stay put for me.” 

Me and Leslie lurked behind a clump of kudzu in the ditch and watched Kate clear up to the big barn doors that were both flung wide.  I heard two rounds out of Kate’s Glock straightaway. 

I took off, and Leslie—in his fashion—ran behind me.  The mules didn’t help him much though the culottes were a boon. 

I couldn’t hear a thing as I closed on the barn.  I had my gun out by then and peeked inside to find five cracker gentleman backed against the far wall as if for execution.  Kate had a bead on the pack of them from the middle of the place, in among a pile of tie rods and a heap of truck bumpers.

“You all right?”

She nodded.  “Called me a cunt.”

One of those fellows shouted out, the wiry one right in the middle with his Orioles cap on backwards, “Do something!”

Kate let another round go.  It thunked into the framing close to that fellow’s head.

I obliged him.  I holstered my gun.  That’s along about when Leslie joined us.  Those boys looked at him.  They all looked at each other and got a little antsy like horses will when the barometric pressure drops. 

Kate fired another round into the wall and told those boys, “Eyes here.”

“Who the shit are you?”  The one in the cap again. I had him pegged for the Meecham if only because he was cleaner than the rest of them and his brogans were all shiny.

“We’ll ask the questions here,” Leslie informed him with more breath and lisp and general sashay than that clutch of boys could stand.  It took two rounds from Kate to settle them down.  I sent Leslie back outside.

We showed them our badges.  I stepped over and clotted up the back door so those gentlemen wouldn’t be tempted to bolt outside.

“You don’t have to end up in jail,” I told them.  “Not today anyway.”

“Paid the other one already,” one of them blurted out.  His colleague to his left tapped him with a crescent wrench.

Kate glanced at me.  We didn’t have much in the way of other ones except for Ronnie and Doug, and I had to think Doug was too new to have found occasion to get out to that barn.

“I know,” I said.  “We’re not double dipping.  Just looking for a car.”

“What do you need?”  That was the bossman talking like a broker.

“A Buick,” Kate told him.  “’89 Skylark.”

When he wouldn’t even look at her and chose instead to ask me, “Why?” Kate put three rounds above his head, one close enough to part his hair. 

As a matter of pride, I guess, he refused to duck or flinch.  He kept looking at me, but I knew better than to tell him shit.

“Can I just shoot one of them clean?” Kate asked me.

“Paperwork,” I warned her. 

I thought we were having a spot of buddy-movie repartee, but then she leveled off and shot the one with the crescent wrench in the forearm, which suggested she was either crazy or had an officious bookkeeping streak.

Those boys all decided that she was flat nuts, and they were trapped on the firing line. 

“Boys,” I told them, “settle down.”

I guess Kate was trying to help when she pointed her Glock halfway up the wall and squeezed her trigger again.  No live round this time, just the hammer falling with a flat, metallic clack, and that proved all those fellows needed to hear. 

They went every damn where, flinging car parts at us.  The shot one threw his wrench at Kate, bounced it off her shoulder. 

“Shoot that fucker!” Kate yelled at me, omitting the “again.”

I grabbed, I think, a water pump and threw that at him instead.  He dodged but tripped on a tangled pile of manifolds and exhaust pipes, and I got to him just as Kate was flogging him with a timing belt.

The shot boy was feeling victimized, and he didn’t care who knew it.  It’s the cracker way to go all put-upon when things go south.  He was whining about how he never got ahead and couldn’t catch a break, going on at such pitiful length that I wanted to flog him myself. 

“Think they’ll come back for him?” Kate asked me, all hopeful and bloodthirsty.

“Any of those boys your kin?” I asked him.  He shook his head.  I told Kate, “No.”

I’d stepped over to the back door and was looking out at nothing much when I realized that part of the general scene—junked cars on a weedy hillside—included a royal blue Buick Skylark with the back wheels and axle off.

“Come here,” I told the shot boy.

He whined some more but came.  He was bleeding a little.  Either Kate was a hell of a shot or that boy could thank the Maker because the bullet had only claimed a strip of skin below his elbow, the sort of wound you might get if you’d fallen off your bike.  That didn’t keep him from acting like a saber had run him through. 

I pointed at the Buick.  “Where did that come from?”

The sound of Kate slapping a fresh clip in shook that fellow up a little.  He looked from me to the Skylark, over to Kate.  I caught him glancing at Leslie as well, Leslie who was browsing through the accumulated car parts, hoping (I guess) to find the sort of gear he’d come across before.

“Can’t say.”

“Think,” I told him.

“I can’t go to jail.”

“Sure you can,” Kate said and closed in to help me back that boy against the wall.

“Momma’s sick,” he informed us, “and daddy ain’t no count.”

“The car,” I said. 

“She needs medicine and shit.”

“Shoot him some more?”  Part of the beauty of Kate—and the terror of her too—was that she sounded to mean every little thing she said.

That boy held up his hand her way like it would be enough to stop a bullet.  “It was Buck or somebody,” he told us.  “Towed it in the other day.”

“Ray?”

I swung around to find Leslie showing me a flywheel.  It was shiny from use here and there and handsome as flywheels go.

“Take whatever you want,” I told him, and Leslie went all quivery.

He gave a little yelp.  He said, “Well I just might.”

I could see the shot boy trying to make sense of all of us together.  He was a dogs and guns and beer and torque wrench sort of guy, and there we’d descended on him out of nowhere.

“Momma’s sick,” was all he could manage.

“Yeah,” I told him.  “We heard.”

In a bid to redirect him, Kate pointed at the Skylark.

“I wasn’t here, but it’s just a few boys that bring cars out this way.  Buck mostly.”

“Buck who?” Kate asked him.

“Got a gas mart out by Critzers.”

“If it wasn’t him, who was it?”

He shook his head.  “If it wasn’t him, Buck’d be the one to know.”

“That other boy said somebody had been paid,” I said.

That fellow spat by way of nodding.

“Who?”

“Ain’t none of my business.”

“Is now.  Who?”

“One with the teeth.”

It had to be Ronnie.  Doug and Verle and R.T., who worked for the state police, all had teeth themselves but not the big square sort like Ronnie.

“How much?” I asked him.

“Ain’t my end of things,” he told us.  “I just take shit apart.”  He lifted his arm and ran his tongue across his seepy wound.  “I’m going to the lockup, ain’t I?”

And I’d decided that he was, but then Ronnie his sorry conniving self came in over the scanner. 

“Ray.”  I could hear him calling to me.  I had the volume full up.  “Ray,” he said, “come on in.”

That boy tried to follow me out, but Kate stopped him with an “Uh uh.”  I got to the sedan as Ronnie was calling to me the umpteenth time.

I reached in for the mic.  “What have you got?”

He said, “Sweet Lord,” and coughed a little.  Then I could hear him gurgling.  I could hear him throwing up.

3

Rusty looked like he’d been dipped in jam.  They’d put him in the back of Ronnie’s car where he’d stained the seat a little and left dark smudges on the glass.  He bounced and barked as me and Kate walked by him toward Rita’s house.  We’d let the shot boy go for the time being and had left Leslie pouting in my Crown Vic, sifting through my file of local psychos.  He’d struck us both as a little too desperate to find out what the fuss was about.

Fido had arrived already with the fat bald guy who bagged groceries at the IGA in between his shifts with the rescue squad.  He hummed a lot but hardly ever said an actual thing.  Fido told us, “Shit, man,” and pointed at the house.  The fat bald guy just nodded and scratched his elbow.

Verle and Ronnie and some other guy were all standing on the porch.  They didn’t look too bluff and hardy, particularly Ronnie.  He was a shade of watch-dial luminescent green.

“Rita?” I asked Verle.

He worried his hat. “I guess.”  Verle pointed at the fellow alongside him.  “Found Rusty up the road.”

“I thought he was tore up or something,” that fellow told us.  “Just damn T covered in blood.”

Ronnie made a noise somewhere in his neck and blundered off the porch.  He hosed off one of Rita’s Nandina bushes.

We could smell it by then, that minerally slaughterhouse aroma.

“Who’s been inside?” Kate asked Verle mostly.

“All of us.”

She snorted.

“Where’s the body?” I said.

Verle did some hat spinning.  “Wish to hell I knew.”

I followed Kate inside.  The front room looked about like we’d last seen it.  The TV was on, tuned to a cooking show.  A woman with a pile of hair and immodest freckled cleavage was making a bean salad from stuff she was dumping out of bowls. Onions. Celery. Black-eyed peas.  Walnuts and diced apples.  A bubbly girl alongside her laughed at everything she said.

There were freezer boxes on the floor.  They’d spilled off of the sofa, and Rita’s TV tray was upended, her gigantic Pepsi on the floor.  Everything else was normally squalid and heaped up in her standard sort of way.  The kitchen door was closed.  I noticed that.  I’d never seen it shut.  It was one of those swinging six-panel doors that Rita always left cocked open.  She couldn’t know when she might need to race into the kitchen after a snack.

We stood there for a moment just shy of the doorway.  The kitchen was leaking stink.  I finally brought a hand up and pushed the door a little.  It hadn’t swung even an honest foot before we saw the blood.  Not splattered but pooled.  A finger of it had run into a dip in the linoleum and crusted over on top.  I opened the door a little farther and we could make out a foot print or two.  Ronnie, I had to guess, had blundered in for a “Well shit.”  Kate pointed out a streak of vomit on a cabinet front. 

I pushed the door wide and cocked it fully open.

“Jesus Lord,” was all I could manage.  There was blood all over the place.  In streaks and splatters and freshets. In pools and rivulets.  It was shiny and dull and flaky here and there, about six different shades from shallow smear to puddle.

Kate stepped on inside.  I was fine where I was.

“Tell Verle to call Gaylord in Richmond.  He needs to come himself.”

I went out on the porch and passed along the message, breathed some passably untainted air.  L had arrived in his Putt Putt attire.

“Where do you want me?” he asked.

I pointed at the weathered porch floorboards, and that seemed to suit L fine. 

“Where did you go in there?” I asked Ronnie. 

“Front room,” he said and looked away.  He added.  “Kitchen . . .  a little.”  Then Ronnie went hustling down the steps and visited the shrubbery again.

“No sign of her?” I was talking to Verle now.

He shook his head.  “Hadn’t looked all over.”

I could hear Rusty barking and Leslie calling to me.  He was out of my Crown Vic now, was hovering by it saying, “Ray?”

I went back in.  Kate had made it all the way to the kitchen table.  She was standing there looking, soaking all of it in.  I lingered in the doorway trying not to see a thing.

“They got her up here somehow.”  Kate pointed to the dinette table.  “You can still see where she was.”

“They haven’t really looked for her yet, not all over,” I informed Kate.  She nodded and came out of the kitchen.  I followed her toward the stairs. 

Treads, being flat, are a good place to stack magazines and catalogs and sacks of grocery coupons, so we essentially followed a sort of deer trail up to the second floor.  Every room up there was piled with stuff.  Heaps of clothes and towels.  Newspapers and TV dinner boxes all flattened out and filed.  Only one of the beds had nothing on it, except for nasty sheets.  Greasy, stained, threadbare.  The mattress was shaped like a basin.  I could imagine Rita falling into it nights, but Lord only knew how she got up.

Kate opened a closet and almost buried herself alive.  Clothes and crap had been shoved in with the door slammed shut behind them. Empty dish soap bottles and grocery sacks full of toilet paper spindles, along with about every wax-coated fried chicken bucket Rita had ever emptied.  I couldn’t help but imagine her stomping them flat and then hauling them up the stairs.

We were about to leave when the damn phone rang.  The Supremes.  Where Did Our Love Go  I had a struggle on my hands to keep myself from jumping straight out the window. 

Kate shoved me out of the way so she could get to the window and scour the yard in case some strain of Mexican was lurking about.

“Think they saw us?” I asked her.

“Saw you,” she told me back.  “Otherwise it would have been ringing all along.”

The phone went silent and then started afresh.  It sounded like it was somewhere in Rita’s nasty bed, so we jerked off the bedclothes and peeled back the sheets.  Everything was oily and slick and stank when you twitched it even a little.

“Underneath,” I told her.

Kate said, “Go on.”  She seemed to have a taste for chivalry when it suited her. 

I got down on my knees, drew a deep breath, and lifted Rita’s dust ruffle.  There looked to be a decade’s worth of grocery store flyers under there.  I caught the pulsing, emerald glow of something about halfway in.

The floor looked like it had sprouted fur.  Every little move I made raised a dustball the size of a house cat.  It didn’t much help that a snakeskin was pinched between the box springs and the slats.

“So?” Kate asked me.  It was her way of saying, “Hurry the hell on up.”

“About there.”  The ringing stopped and started again while I was closing.  The phone was sitting on top of something.  A big pickle jar, from what I could see. “Give me a glove or something.”

Kate obliged, which is to say she dropped one on my back.  I gloved up and started back under.  The phone rang again.  I plucked it off the jar lid, eased back with it, and tossed it up to Kate.  It was another cheap clamshell.  She opened it up and listened.  I could hear the tinny, recorded voice.

“Sounds like Portuguese,” Kate said.

I ducked back under for the jar.  It was surely full of something.  Maybe just pickles for all I could see in Rita’s bedroom light.

“It was sitting on this,” I informed Kate as I shoved the jar in the clear.  She picked it up in her gloved hands and carried it to the window.  She held it up to catch the fading light. It didn’t look like pickles at all.

Just showing up outside and setting that jar on the porch rail was enough to send Ronnie straight into the shrubbery to yack.

There was some kind of organ floating in some kind of milky fluid. 

“No sign of Rita?” Verle asked us. 

Kate considered the jar.  “Not as such,” she said.

“Bound to be around here somewhere,” Ronnie volunteered from the shrubbery.  “You’d about need a winch to get her in a truck.”

“Been around back?” Kate asked Verle and Ronnie but got just hat spinning and bush lingering by way of reply.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” she told Verle.  “Somebody’s watching us from somewhere.”

“Who?” he asked her. 

“Only called once they knew we were up there.  Saw the light come on or something.”

Verle laid a hand to his pistol grip.  Ronnie thought better of doing anything constructive and threw up.

“You gone need me?” the neighbor asked Kate.  “I got shit to do.”

“Tell him.” She pointed at Verle, and I followed Kate around the house.

The back gate was open.  The yard was such a shambles, it was hard to tell what might be fresh from what was longstanding and old.  The grass was tall and all bent over.  Rusty had made paths here and there.  There was a tongue of flattened fescue off the back steps that looked suspicious.  Kate and I followed a vague disturbance outside of the gate.  Something or somebody had gone through the underbrush, had laid it all down and didn’t care who saw it.

We’d soon cleared the scrub altogether and were into the forest proper, which was cool and gloomy in the canopy-strangled afternoon sunlight.  Somebody had dragged something through there.  We could see that much.  The leaf litter looked the way it does when cattle have walked over it, like it’s been stirred and fluffed from underneath.  Over the occasional spot of hard ground, we’d lose sight of the track sometimes, but we could pick it up if we looked ahead, and it seemed clear where it was heading.

We saw the afghan first.  It was orange and brown and blue and ivory, the usual hideous afghan colors.  It hardly looked like anything natural out there in the woods.  It was draped over a laurel bush, so we were meant to see it.  Once we’d gotten up to it, we could hardly miss Rita across the way.  She was sitting on the ground leaning up against a tree.  It wasn’t the trebuchet tree exactly but close enough to make the point.  She was wearing a hot pink raincoat, a pair of shiny blue rubber boots.  She had a hat on too, a floppy nor’easter with a strap fastened around her chin.  That seemed a little redundant given the gutter spike holding it on.

Rita looked exceedingly dead, even from over where we were.  Her skin was as white and waxy as any I’d ever seen.

“Walk where I walk,” Kate told me.

That’s precisely what I did, all the way from the laurel bush to the tree where Rita had been left. 

The raincoat didn’t exactly fit, and Rita wasn’t dressed beneath it.  Not anyway beyond a jet black slip that also didn’t fit.  It had been ripped or cut or something as the only means of getting it on, and Rita was pouring out of every little gap where flesh could leak.   

“Three or four of them, don’t you think, to get something her size out here?”

Kate shrugged and studied Rita.

“Let’s leave somebody out here until Gaylord comes,” Kate told me. “Keep the animals away.”

We arrived together at our candidate.

Kate eyed the terrain.  “He won’t get here in mules.”

I gave Leslie the boots I kept in the car trunk and the flashlight from the glovebox.  Just in case, I told him, he had to brain a squirrel or me and Kate got hung up in the house. Then I walked him out to where Rita was.  He had me take his fingers and help him across various spots of uneven terrain.

“These boots are beastly,” Leslie told me and grabbed my forearm for effect.

“Not much farther.”  I lead him directly to the laurel bush with the hideous afghan draped upon it.

“Stay right here,” I told him.  I pointed at the blanket.  “Watch that.”

Once Leslie had eyed the thing a little, he told me, “Eewww.”

I gave him my phone.  “Call the sheriff if there’s a problem.  Just hold down two.”  I already had reason to know he’d have to wander for a signal, but I guessed he could discover that for himself.

“Who’s one?” Leslie asked me.

I was twenty yards gone and moving fast when I turned around to tell him.  “As long as you’re here, watch her a little too.”

“Ray?”  Leslie called out four or five times.  “Is that lady even all right?”

I could sort of still hear him at the edge of the woods.  He was singing by then for courage.  It was a droning Andrew Lloyd Webberish sort of thing.

Dr. Gaylord was in the vicinity by the time I got back to the house but on the wrong road, he’d decided, and lost deep in a hollow.  He was describing landmarks to the neighbor, the guy who’d scooped up Rusty.  Or he was describing them to Verle anyway on the phone.  Verle was acting as the go-between.

“Says he can see a fence and some kind of little house.”

“A shed?”

“A shed?” Verle asked.

Dr. Gaylord didn’t know from sheds. 

“He sees a car up the road,” Verle told us.

And sure enough he did.  It was the rear end of mine, and the good doctor shortly pulled straight up the driveway.

Dr. Gaylord was a Richmond swell when he wasn’t being forensic, and he was wearing his fine twill khakis and his loafers and oxford shirt.  He had an assistant with him, a young brunette of Korean extraction who he introduced as Miss Song.  She called him “Doctor” crisply whenever he directed talk her way, and she got to haul his tackle boxes full of implements and stuff.

“Crime scene,” Kate informed him and pointed at the house.  “The body’s up in the woods.”

“I’m here if you need me,” L told Dr. Gaylord who studied L’s Putt-Putt togs—maroon trousers and a blue striped shirt—as he informed Kate, “Here first.”

“Found that under her bed,” I told him and pointed at the pickle jar. 

Gaylord lifted it off the porch rail and held it up so light would pass through.  “Pancreas,” he said.  “Not hers.”  He indicated dry, shriveled places.  “In the jar a while.”

Kate held the screen door open, and Gaylord set the pickle jar down.  He and Miss Song got ushered inside by Kate.

“Who’s that boy up in the woods?” the neighbor asked me. 

L told him, “Leslie,” before I could manage to speak.

“You know him?” I asked L.

He nodded.

“Where from?”

“Around.”

I tried to imagine the sorts of spots where a fellow like L might run up on Leslie, but when I couldn’t think of a seemly place, I just let it go.

Ronnie was lingering by the shrubs and looking luminescent.  I came down the steps and told him, “Let’s take Rusty for a walk.”

I made a leash out of crime scene tape and tied one end to Rusty’s collar.  Then I let him lead me and Ronnie to the street.

“Find her?” Fido wanted to know as we passed him on the driveway.

“Up in the woods.”

“Again?”

The fat, bald guy laughed.  I can’t imagine at what.  He scratched his ample backside and hummed a little.

Me and Ronnie walked up the road a bit.  Rusty tried to chase a squirrel and made an attempt to chew through his crime scene leash.

“Jesus, Ray,” Ronnie told me, and then nothing else got said until I asked him flat out why he’d been taking money from those boys.

“What boys?”  Ronnie suddenly didn’t know any boys anywhere, and he pressed me to tell him in detail where I’d heard such a damnable lie.

“Chop shop,” I told him. “Meechams. Want me to bring them in and talk it over?”

Ronnie took a few deep breaths. 

“Wasn’t like you think,” he allowed at last.

“What do I think?”

“That I’m taking money and shit to keep from doing what I ought.” 

Ronnie glanced down at the bloody dog we were walking, and I guess the murder and the gore married suddenly to the graft had a wrenching enough effect on Ronnie to cause him to spew again.  He aimed for the ditch, even hit it a little. 

“It’s all that blood,” Ronnie told me as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.  “Probably the Chinese buffet clams some too.”

He’d needed tires.  That’s how they got him.  He knew one of those boys from The Cue Ball or somewhere.  They got to talking, and pretty soon Ronnie had a nearly new set of Super Swampers. 

“I bought them,” he told me.

“What did you pay?”

He winced and shook his head.  “Not enough, but he was a boy I’d been knowing.  I figured he wanted them out of his yard.”

“Then what?”

“Needed tie rods.  He just up and gave them to me.”

“And the money?”

“Twenty or thirty here and there.  It ain’t like I’m making out.”

“What do you do for it?”

Ronnie dropped his head.  I guessed he’d seen authentically ashamed people do that and figured he’d give it a shot.  “Ran tags a time or two,” he told me.

“What else?”

“Don’t see stuff I ought to see.”

“Like what.”

“A guy with a car on his hook, like that.”

“What guy?” I asked him.  “Which hook?”

“They got two or three fellows bring them cars.  A couple of boys from down by Scottsville.  Another guy they just called Pope.”

“Where’s he from?”

Ronnie shrugged. 

“I want to talk to those boys, that Meecham and his crew,” I told him.

“Where?”

“All in one place, and I don’t care where.  They’ll walk away when it’s over unless they’re into worse shit than you’re saying.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Ronnie groaned.  “Aw, Ray,” he said.  “What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Any damn thing that works.  Otherwise, we’ll be talking to Verle, and I don’t guess you want that.”

We were nearly back to the house by then.

“I didn’t mean no harm,” he told me.  “I was in it before I knew it.” 

“I’m prepared to believe you, as long as you round them up.”

We put Rusty back in Ronnie’s car, and Rusty didn’t like it much.  He barked and yelped so that we could hardly make out Leslie who must have run through his entire show tune repertoire because he was onto hymns.  I had to listen hard to pick it up —Oh Lord, Thy World is Sweet With Prayer.

Dr. Gaylord spent a while in the kitchen.  You had to figure he would.  Miss Song kept coming in and out with evidence bags and gore in bottles.  Her and the doctor had brought the sort of camera just the state police could afford.  From the porch, we could see the flash and hear it sing as it reset.  Kate stayed in there with them.  L even ventured as far as the kitchen door until Gaylord caught sight of him and said to him hotly, “What?”

“See anybody up here?” I asked the neighbor.  “Anybody on the road you didn’t know?”

He spat.  He shook his head.

“You home all day?”

It turned out he’d driven off at lunchtime to buy himself some scratch-off tickets. 

“Home last night?” I asked him.

“Watching TV,” he said.  “Didn’t see nobody.  A little traffic maybe.  Wasn’t figuring on nothing like this.”

“What kind of traffic?”

“Nothing special.  Road don’t go nowhere.  Kids come up here to drink and shit.”

“Where?” I asked him.

He pointed the way country people do, like everything you want and everywhere you need to go is above the horizon somewhere.

“Show me.”

That neighbor wasn’t much of a walker. His golf cart was in the driveway, and we piled into it together even though it was thirty yards to the end of the road. On the way, he instructed me to call him Bud and told me about a boy and a girl he’d stumbled onto once.

“Big girl, down to her knickers, and he wasn’t wearing but a shirt.” He shook his head like that was something he had never hoped to see.

He whipped around so at the end of the road, I almost pitched straight out of the cart.  There was trash all over, twelve-pack boxes mostly but hamburger wrappers and flattened cigarette packs as well. 

“Got a stick or something?” I asked Bud.

“No sir.  Got a sand wedge.”

He gave me that, and I stirred up the rubbish with it.  Didn’t turn up anything of interest.

There was what looked to me a deer trail running up through the thicket where the road quit, and I followed it to a scraggly clearing with knee-high grass and a lone hickory tree.  Somebody had climbed it.  They’d left mud on the bark.  I couldn’t say when or who, but I had to guess half way up you’d get a pretty good look at Rita’s house, particularly the upper story where me and Kate had been.  I could see where somebody had waded through the grass to slip away.  

I eased in past the tree line but lacked both a flashlight and the nerve to head on down and see what I might find.  I heard twigs popping and leaves crackling the way you will when you’ve got just a sand wedge and pistol and might be facing the sort of people who’d keep a pancreas in a jar.

I came back out to the golf cart.

“When’s the last time you saw anybody up here?” I asked Bud.

“Trash man.  Maybe Tuesday.”

“Back here?”

Bud nodded.  “Eating lunch or something.  Shady, you know.”

“Doc and that boy?”

Bud nodded again.  “Truck sitting right there.”

“Anybody else?”

“Not that I recall.  You thinking they parked back here and slipped up on her?”

I shrugged.  “I’m thinking I’ll probably walk back to the house.” 

By the time I got back, Dr. Gaylord was ready to head into the woods.  He was giving instructions to Fido when I arrived in the yard, telling him what to carry with him, telling him who to follow, telling him what to do when he got there, telling him where to stand.  Fido spat, which was Fido’s version of “Yes sir” and “Fuck off” both together.  His fat bald associate just stood there breathing through his mouth and scratching.

We left Ronnie at the house, sent Bud the neighbor on home.  The rest of us followed Kate in single file into the woods.  I tried to help Miss Song with all the stuff she had to carry, but she was too proud for that and wouldn’t let me, so I just collected what she dropped.

Leslie gave us a “Hallelujah!” when we came into view.  He waved his flashlight like he was trying to guide in a plane.  It was as good as dark by then, back in the deep woods anyway.  Twilight out on the clear ground, but that didn’t help us much in the trees.

Kate and Dr. Gaylord went on ahead of the rest of us.  In their smocks and hats and gloves and paper masks they seemed to unnerve Leslie.  Or, given that he was frantic already, they failed to calm him much.

“I didn’t touch nothing,” he wailed at them, “and I’ve got to tinkle something awful.”

Kate pointed to a spot where Leslie could retire and evacuate, and he did both with a lot more mince and swish than Verle seemed to have hoped for or expected, given the huffing and violent hat spinning Verle indulged in for a while. 

“She’s dead, Ray,” Leslie told me, still hosing off leaf litter.  “And it wasn’t like that blanket needed watching.”

That was about as peeved as I’d ever caused Leslie to get.  He shook and zipped, wheeled around on me with his hands to his hips.

“Sorry,” I told him.

“Too late, mister.”  Leslie went stomping off.  Not far off because he’d set down his flashlight to pee.

When a deer snorted back in the murk somewhere, Leslie spun and came right over.  He laid his hand flat on his sternum to let me know he was too wrought up to speak.

“Ribs from the drive-in,” I told him.  “Bottle of Lillet.”

Leslie made a show of being offended that I’d try to buy him off.  It didn’t last. “The big bottle,” he informed me.

I said, “All right,” and it was done.

Dr. Gaylord and Kate were huddled by Rita with Miss Song crowding close, tackle boxes in hand.

“Two fifty?” I heard the good doctor propose.

“Three hundred,” Kate told him.  “I’ve seen smaller cows.”

Verle made his I-just-ate-earwax face.  He’d romanced the woman after all.  Maybe a lot of coffee cakes and chicken legs ago, but he’d held her bare flesh in his arms and had loved her up, I figured.  Now they were debating whether ordinary humans could have hauled her into the woods.

When the doctor instructed Kate to open Rita’s slicker, we all got told to train our lights upon her, so we all saw her incision.  It was seepy and ghastly looking through her gauzy negligee.

Rita looked to have been stitched up like a football.  If the sutures weren’t sneaker laces, they were something awfully close.

The trebuchet guy had made Fido a sort of local authority on how to haul doughy corpses overland.  So once Dr. Gaylord had taken all the pictures he thought he ought to and him and Kate and Miss Song had studied Rita as best they could manage in the wild, Fido got waved in. 

Those boys had only brought a litter, and the idea of carrying Rita on it was enough of a wretched prospect to drive Fido’s colleague to speak aloud. 

He told all of us, “Hell.”

We all pitched in to help them load her.  Rita was wider than the litter makers had maybe contemplated, so she was coming off of that stretcher everywhere.  Fido and his buddy could pick her up with a lot of groaning and lurching, and they even carried her about three yards before they set her down.

“Come on,” I told Leslie.  Verle pitched in too.  He even shouted for Ronnie back at the house who stayed where he was and told Verle, “What?”

So the five of us staggered through the woods.  We would put her down and pick her up.  Rita was leaking gas or something because she’d squeak and gurgle every now and again, and Leslie would tell me, “Ray.”

It was the sort of enterprise I felt sure to dredge up at odd hours, the way I’m haunted by that time I had to finish a deer off with a hammer when me and the fellow who hit him with his coupe couldn’t produce between us a gun.  It was good for poisoning afternoons.  Now Rita could do the same.

Ronnie even helped us a little once we’d finally reached the house. He encouraged us anyway and informed us where we ought to step.  Verle encouraged Ronnie back, and Leslie informed him a little as well.  Ronnie was moved to offer to help us by the time we’d reached the truck. 

We had to put her on a proper gurney and so touch her more than was seemly.  Then Verle shut her slicker and fixed her hands.  He helped Fido cover her up.

“I’m sorry,” I told him once the truck doors were shut and Verle had given Fido clearance to head for Richmond.

He shook his head.  He glanced at Rita’s mildewed pile of a house.  “She wasn’t always like this,” Verle allowed. 

I had to hope that was the case.   

Those rescue squad boys were probably gone for a good half hour before Kate, Miss Song, and the doctor finally came out of the woods.  They’d bagged the afghan, and Dr. Gaylord was carrying it under his arm.  Miss Song had everything else, and Kate was devouring an Iroquois.

“Seal it up.  Lock it down.” Gaylord jerked his head toward the house. 

Verle tried to put Ronnie on the job but he’d hardly reached the porch when he vomited loudly onto the planking.  So me and Verle together closed the place up.  Switched off the TV, shut off the lights.  We found Rita’s key ring in a bowl by the door and so locked the front door properly and tight.

Rusty was little short of howling in the backseat of Ronnie’s cruiser.  Ronnie finished spewing, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and asked me and Verle together, “What about him?”

4

Ronnie carried Leslie to Afton in exchange for me taking Rusty home.  Kate came with me.  She was staying on full-time by then.  Wandering my house nights with her insomnia, making the whole place stink of smoke.

We’d stopped at the Kroger for wine and a pizza that looked like it had passed through a cow.  It turned out to be all cheese fat and third-rate pepperoni.  The crust tasted like it had started as Wonder Bread.  Kate took one bite and then flung the entire pie into the backyard.  I didn’t try to stop her, could see she was in a mood.

Kate had been chasing our pancreas guy for some time after all, and she’d gotten used to catching the people she was after.  For my part, I was far more accustomed to coming up half empty and wasn’t prone to Kate’s brand of indignation over homicide.  I get forlorn when I see the things people up and do to each other.  It hardly matters to me if it’s drink or psychosis that finally brings it out.  I wanted our guy as well but feared he’d be a disappointment, that he’d been up to a lot of carnage for no sound reason he could say. 

I remember a boy down in Danville I’d picked up for killing a buddy with a hatchet.  When I showed him photographs of the corpse, he shook his head and told me, “Damn.”  He confessed while seeming to hold out hope that he couldn’t have possibly done it.  I wanted Kate’s guy to be a little less divided, have some sort of rationale for all the mayhem he’d been up to, though the chances were decent we could show him an organ or twelve and get a “Damn.”

“Well,” I told Kate once I’d stepped onto my tiny, cluttered back porch and seen that the pizza had landed cheese-side down, “I guess we ought to clean Rusty up or something.”

He was sitting on the kitchen floor all brown and clotted, waiting on my crust, which he wasn’t going to get now that it was all I had to eat.

“How about a bath?” I asked him. 

He reared up, laid his front feet on my leg, and barked at me like I was a squirrel.

As it turned out, Rusty didn’t like a bath and not the way most dogs don’t like a bath but in a special I’ll-be-damned-if-I’m-getting-shampooed feral fashion.  He squirmed and he nipped and he howled and he yelped so that Everett came wandering over.  Since his set was never off, I had to guess he’d heard Rusty over the History Channel. 

He knocked on the back door.  I shouted him in, and he showed up to say, “Thought I heard something.”

“Did,” I told him about the moment that Rusty laid into my wrist.  “Jesus, dog.” He did a little lunging at my nose as well.

Everett finally noticed what was sluicing down the drain.  You don’t generally get a quart or so of blood from a terrier shampoo. 

“What’s he been into?” Everett asked us.

Kate informed him, “Seepage.”

Everett said, “Oh,” and crossed his arms like he was satisfied.

And maybe he was because he started in on a program he’d just seen about the Gurkhas.  “Damned if they ain’t something,” he told us while Rusty yelped and writhed.  Then he doled out what he could remember of everything he’d watched, unedited and in no particular order.

“Got any food over there?” Kate finally asked him.  We were on about Rusty’s third rinse.  “A pizza worth eating or something?”

“Box of Hot Pockets,” Everett told her.  “Had them a while. They don’t much agree with me.”

“You mind?  We fucked our supper up.”

“I seen it,” Everett told her and pitched his head toward the backyard.  Then he said in my direction, “Some mouth.”

Everett ducked out and came back with a box from his freezer.  By the look of it, those Hot Pockets hadn’t disagreed with Everett in a considerable while.

“Mind popping a couple in the toaster oven?” I asked him.

Everett didn’t mind at all.  “Don’t call me once they do what they do.”  Everett’s form of bon appetit!

Rusty kept a pink tinge no matter how we scrubbed.  Kate was all for bleaching him, but I doubted that would turn out well, so we just left him pink, dried him as best we could with towels, and then let him tear through the house and have the sort of fit you might expect from a dog who’d probably not seen bathwater in a great while.

Our Hot Pockets were done by then, steaming and greasy anyway.  I tasted mine, but Kate just tossed hers straight out the back door.  She’d decided by then to make do with wine and a half sleeve of stale saltines.  We sat at the dinette in the kitchen and went over what we knew while Rusty yipped and yowled and darted all over the place.  Somehow he shoved the cushions off the sofa and knocked over a table lamp.  I said a couple of hard things to him before I gave it up.

“He must have seen it all,” I said to Kate.  “Why don’t we haul him around with us and see if he barks at anybody in some special kind of way.”

Kate took a sip of wine and made the face you had to make since it was on its way to vinegar already.  “That sounds about like something Ronnie would say.”

I sulked for half a minute and then concentrated on my burping.  My Hot Pocket had turned to gas quicker than anything I’d ever had.

“Did you talk to him about the chop shop boys?”

I pounded my sternum and nodded. 

“They bought him off with tires.  He ran a few plates but mostly just looked the other way.  He’s going to round them up for us.  Ronnie’s awful sorry.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I found a tree down the road, in front of Rita’s, where they might have been watching us.”

“Not us,” she told me and swigged and grimaced.  “You, I’m guessing.  You in the woods with the catapult guy.  You in the house with her.  They’re watching you.  You know one of them.  Just wait and see if you don’t.”

I made a quick, involuntary accounting of all the local people I’d run up on or rousted who might be able to find a pancreas with a map.  It was a fairly short list.

“Why do you figure they’re hanging here?” I asked Kate.

“Last stand maybe.  I don’t know.  Could be just tired of traveling.”

“How many you think it took for Rita?”

“I’d say three normal humans.  Maybe just a couple of no necks.”

“Got to be related, don’t you think? Would have all come undone before now.”

“Could be.  Before today, I was thinking just one guy, so what the hell do I know?”

Rusty came ripping through the kitchen, knocked over the trash can, tore down the back hall.  We heard him clanging around in the bathroom.

“If it’s people,” Kate offered, “instead of one guy, might make sense if it’s a family or a cult.” 

“Not much difference between them back in here.”

“Anybody spring to mind?”

I didn’t have to do much thinking.  “Plenty of hardheads out there, but most of them have never left the county.  If it was just some local thing, we’d have candidates all over.”

“Let’s say they just have roots here.  Come and go.  Anybody like that?”

“A few maybe.  We ought to talk to Ronnie and Verle.  I’ve only been here a few years.”

“We’re looking for somebody shrewd,” Kate told me.  “Somebody with a system and a process and a plan.  Think how long they’ve gone without so much as being spotted.”

I stepped over to the drawer by the stove and dug out my ratty county map, all feathery at the creases and stained with who knew what.  It was eight years out of date but nothing much had changed.  Local people got ambitious sometimes and laid out shopping plazas and business parks.  A few of them even got built, or half built, or had ground staked out and leveled.  But nothing ever took and thrived, and they all got abandoned in the end. 

If it had been up to me to write the county motto, I would have made it the Latin version of Aim Low.  We had a few cosmetic horse farms to the east for Keswick wannabees, a ski resort out on the western border with snow about every third year, and a lot of rocky pastureland and rugged hardwood forests with shacks and junky trailers at the verges.

“Got Garvys here.”  I pointed.  “Thieves mostly.  Low rung on the cracker trash ladder.  Even Ronnie can catch a Garvy."

“Back in here?” Kate asked.  She’d picked out a spot a little north and east of Rita’s with just one or two roads showing on the map and a veiny web of creeks and branches.

“Sadlers.  A few Philpots.  Clutch of them like a tumor right around here.”

“Thieves?”

I nodded.  “Sadlers, but just construction sites.  Copper and tools and lumber and diesel fuel.  Bad drinkers.  They’ll fight about any damn body, but they have a way of just killing each other.”

“Recently?”

“Two years maybe.  An uncle and a nephew warring over a trailer hitch.”

“Who went down?”

“Some cousin.  He tried to break it up.  Sadlers don’t like meddlers. They took turns beating him with a pipe.  The Philpots are more the scheming sort, but it’s all half-cocked and undercooked.  They hijacked a WalMart truck a while back, left the driver tied up at a rest stop.  The load was mostly diapers and towels and candles and cleaning supplies.  No electronics anywhere.  That pissed them off so that they dropped the trailer in the middle of the Afton road and went on a joyride in the cab to Roanoke. A trooper picked them up at a Stuckeys.  Probably another six or eight months until they’re out.”

“No evil sons-of-bitches anywhere?”  Kate let out a breath like she’d never been so disappointed in a place.  Rusty came streaking through with my shoehorn in his mouth.  It was a long-handled tortoiseshell item I’d used once to pry open a box lid.  So I only started to tell him, “Rusty!” before I realized I didn’t care.

I went back to the map.  “Evil.  Let’s see.”  We had a few pockets of nastiness.  There wasn’t much doubt about that.  The truly bad sort seemed to like to have their backs against the mountains.  They were all of them west and north, crowding the skyline drive.

“Here,” I said and laid my finger on a hollow.  “Here.”  I went to the adjacent one.  “Here too.”

“Do tell.”

“Meth.”  I tapped the first hollow again.  “It’s Webbs married in with Critzers.  Way back they had orchards and berries but quit paying the taxes on the land.  County took it.  I believe the Grubers ended up with it.”

“Funny how that works.”

“Now they just cook meth. Get caught at. Go to jail for it.  Get out.  Cook more meth. No time much for systematic, crosscountry homicide.”

“Them?” She tapped the second spot.

“Blevins.  Can’t get two words out of any of them.”

“What’s their pleasure?”

“Won’t do any damn thing they’re supposed to do, mostly because they’re supposed to do it.”

“Sovereign citizens?”

“They’re not thinking that hard.  Keep their kids out of school.  Won’t pay taxes.  Hunt anywhere they want to.  The state police caught a half dozen of them butchering a bear up in the park.”

Kate perked up.  “Butchering how?”

“Nothing special.  Just stripping off the good bits and leaving the rest for the coyotes.”

“Violent.”

“In fits, but it’s all hotheaded shit.  They nearly killed their mailman once when a package they were waiting for got rained on.  Mean and stupid, the whole pack of them.  Don’t even need to drink."

“Worth a look?”

I nodded.  “I wouldn’t put anything past them, but they don’t seem the planning sort.”

“And here?” she said and tapped the map again.

“Fuller road.  Fuller creek.  Fuller every damn thing.”  I paused and grimaced over a swig of wine.  “They’re a little complicated.”

She waited.  I yelled at Rusty once he’d knocked my change bowl to the floor.  I could hear the thump and tinkle of the pennies and silver hitting the carpet.

“Put him out?”  Kate asked me.

I shook my head.  “He’d go straight for the pizza, and he’s trouble enough already.”

Rusty barked twice and then turned over the TV or something.  I shoved my glass at Kate, and she refilled it.

“Complicated how?” she wanted to know.

“They’re a mixed up bunch.  One of them’s at Yale.  One of them’s at Pelican Bay.”

“For what?”

“Killed his girlfriend.  Girlfriend’s mother.  Girlfriend’s mother’s neighbor. She put his favorite sweater in the dryer.  The other two just happened to be handy.”

“Gun? Knife?”

“A coatrack,” I told her.  “They sent the pictures around.” I got well beyond Hot Pocket queasy just thinking about them again.

“More like him back home?”

“We’ve had some trouble with a few.  They scare me a little.  Smarter than they ought to be.  Erratic as hell.”

“And say it’s somebody from off and away.  Any imports you keep an eye on?”

“A bunch of hippies out past the river.  They all live together in a couple of old houses.  Stole a cow once and a Pontiac.  Shoplift like crazy, but I can’t imagine the whole pack of them could locate a pancreas if they tried.  The odd snowbird otherwise.  Motorhome crowd.”

Rusty came into the kitchen and sat on the floor.  He looked like a regular well-behaved dog there for a couple of seconds.  Then he started barking at us.  He bounced and barked.  He sat.  He whimpered a little.  He stood and barked some more.

“What does he want?” Kate asked me.

“Maybe he’s confused, wondering what he’s doing here.  Might miss Rita a little.”

“He lived in a mud hole.  Got by on chicken bones.”

“Home’s home, you know?”

Then Rusty gave it all the lie by taking a dump right on the kitchen floor.  It was a tidy, well-formed evacuation.  When he finished, he wheeled and admired it.  Then he barked once further, raced into the front room, and knocked over something else.